


ours

by purplemechanics



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, F/M, Guess who's on a ship again, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Mystery, Pregnancy, Storm's End Power couple, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-23 15:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19704529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplemechanics/pseuds/purplemechanics
Summary: “No.” Her response is so fierce and quick that he starts, turning to look at her. She, who only moments before had trembled at the thought of the life growing inside her, levels him with a gaze born of fire and storm and a northern affinity for pack. “What’s done is done. This is ours, and I won’t fuck it up.” She says it like she believes herself. He knows she doesn’t. But he knows she won’t fuck it up.





	ours

He finds her sitting on the grassy cliff edge, staring lifelessly at the ferocious waves below. The sun is shining, but darker clouds rest on the horizon. Her horse is somewhere further behind her, grazing, probably with more than enough sense to stay away from the edge. The salt wind whips at her hair, longer than he’s ever seen it, though still not reaching more than a few inches below her shoulders. She pulls at strands of grass between her hands, and though he knows she would not let herself fall, his heart skips several beats. 

Despite the proximity to a deathly plunge, he approaches her slowly. He sweeps his cloak out of the way and settles himself next to her on the ground, his arms propped up on bent knees where her legs are folded neatly. She isn’t surprised that he’s there. Always calls him “lumbering,” as if he could control his gait, make himself as small as her. She always hears him coming.

For a while, she says nothing, just continues to stare out at the sea. He knows it’s not his turn to speak. He came out here to make sure she was okay, to figure out what she made of all this, but he would not ask her. He takes only what she gives, that is his rule, and it is more than enough for him.

“How’d you find me?” She finally asks, still not turning to look at him. 

He breathes a short laugh. “Were you hiding?” He’d never be able to find her if she didn’t want him to.

Her lips tighten slightly. Imperceptibly, really, but he knows his wife. He knows a storm rages within her, somewhere he can not see, somewhere beyond his reach. How desperate he is to reach it. 

“I suppose not,” she concedes, and he almost thinks she’s going to take up her mantle of silence once more when she asks him, “The maester told you?”

He nods slowly, unsure if she will be upset that she didn’t get the chance to tell him herself. Unsure if she would be able to tell him. She knows the maester’s name, of course - Maester Perbrook - but she has chosen not to say it. It’s a habit from her earlier days at the castle. “The cook, the stable boy, the blonde serving girl,” she’d call them, refusing to learn their names as if she wasn’t expecting to stay, as if she didn’t have time to make any personal connections. As if she was scared to.

And yet, here she is, a year and three months later, still living in the Stormlands, come to him after her great western adventure. A year and three months their friends, all those “nameless” people. Five months his wife. 

And well on two months with child, if the maester is to be believed.

She rips further at the grass. “I thought I was getting fat.”

He says nothing, but shakes his head, because in truth even looking at her now he can’t _tell_. He thought he would be able to tell. Her stomach looks just as flat to him as it ever has underneath her leathers, her frame just as small.

“I thought maybe - I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing,” she continues, still looking away, eyes as dark grey as the storm clouds rolling in. “I thought it was okay to not be as ready to fight as I’ve always been. I thought it was okay now.” 

“It is okay,” he insists, because he can see her warring with herself, because he _loves her_ , because he will love her no matter what state she’s infor as long as he lives.

“It’s not.” He swears he can hear her voice tremble. 

He had been expecting this. He thought she might even try to run for a few days, were this to happen. He knows what she’s been through and why it’s motherhood that scares her more than any of that. He knows, so he tries not to be hurt.

He looks back out at the ocean, the waves choppy and wild, and yet the sound of them soothes him to be near. “What do you want to do?” He can’t tell if his voice sounds as much like two rocks grating together as it feels.

He can sense her looking at him, can see in the corner of his vision her eyes, sharp and smart and dangerous and beautiful. “There is nothing for me to do,” she says like she is reminding him that the fork closest to his plate is for the meal, not the salad. 

“Moon tea,” he says. “It’s not too late to take it, he said. There’s a chance it could... end things.” His heart wrenches, and he can’t help but wonder if she just hadn’t thought of it or if she didn’t know, if no one had taken the time to tell her about it. And of course, who would have?

“No.” Her response is so fierce and quick that he starts, turning to look at her. She, who only moments before had trembled at the thought of the life growing inside her, levels him with a gaze born of fire and storm and a northern affinity for pack. “What’s done is done. This is ours, and I won’t fuck it up.” She says it like she believes herself. He knows she doesn’t. But he knows she won’t fuck it up.

She’s always been so devoted to her family, so much so that when they had wed, she had remained Arya Stark, much to the chagrin of Maester Perbrook and several other highly opinionated nobles in his lands. He couldn’t care less, himself. She is his, regardless of name. Just like he is hers. He learned long ago that he couldn’t try to change her, not if he was going to love her. This child is her family now, too. He can see it in her eyes, whether she is able to recognize it or not.

He shifts closer and slides an arm over her shoulders, gripping tight, effectively encompassing them both in the fabric of his cloak. She leans into him, her head resting against his shoulder. The storm clouds roll ever closer. “Ours,” he murmurs into her hair, and though he cannot see her face, he swears she smiles. 

——

She gets sick a lot for a few weeks. She leaves the room and will not let him see her, will not let him attend to her. Sometimes a servant comes rushing to her aid and she snaps at them, and then has to go seek them out to gruffly apologize because she _never_ wants to be the kind of highborn everyone always thought she should be. When she crawls back into bed with shaking fingers and foul breath, he strokes her hair until she falls asleep again.

——

He’s able to tell a little better by the third moon, to see the subtle curve of her stomach. The maester makes endless comments about the babe’s growth. It’s unlike anything he’s ever seen, he says, astonished. The Baratheon broadness will undoubtedly live in it’s shoulders. He’s never seen a woman in her third moon so big! 

Arya is a bit less taken with Perbrook’s insistences than Gendry.

She’s begun wearing simple gowns, or sometimes long tunics with leggings on underneath to allow for movement. She grumbles about her expanding waist, but he marvels at it. She lets him splay a hand over her abdomen more often than he would admit that he _needs_ to _._ She teases his adoration, but he knows in secret that she shares it. She can’t fool him into thinking she won’t love her baby, and he tells her as much one night while they lie awake in the dark and sweltering heat, waiting for cool rains to bring some reprieve. 

She confesses to him that she’s not sure she remembers how.

“To love?” He asks, baffled.

She shrugs, scrunching up the sheets around her shoulders. “No one but you.”

He rolls over onto his stomach, moving partially on top of her, but he’s careful to lift his weight, not to put any strain on her. He looks straight into her, and she meets his stare with her own. “So you love me, then,” he says, never more sure of anything. 

She rolls her eyes. “I’ve just told you that, you great oaf-”

“You love me, and you love Jon,” he reminds her. She quiets. “You love Sansa and Bran.” He squeezes her shoulder. “And I know you still love the people you’ve lost. I know that never leaves a person.”

She seems at a loss. He’s a little too pleased with himself.

“You will love it because it’s _yours_ , Arya. You love your own. You could never forget that.”

She reaches up to kiss him, and he thinks it might be so he doesn’t see the emotion flitting over her face. “I’ll love her because she’s yours,” she agrees when she pulls back, breath blowing over his lips. 

He’s too busy kissing her to realize what she said, for a moment. Then he jerks back. “Her?” 

She shrugs again, a smile teasing at the corners of her mouth. “Just a guess.” 

——

Sometimes visiting lords and ladies make comments about the babe, so after a few incidents with some snide comments and some threatening daggers thrown too close to the offender’s head, she does her best to keep out of sight when visitors call. The lords tell him to watch out, for a pregnant wife is a volatile wife, especially with one as dangerous as his. The ladies tell him not to judge her too harshly for lapses of judgement or emotion, especially when the babe is born, because she can’t help it much. If she flips a dish from the table, or screams at him in the night, or weeps at the sight of a flower, it’s all natural and to be expected.

He privately thinks that if either one of them is going to be weeping when the child is born, it’s more likely to be him. 

——

He’s been angry with her before. It’s not so terribly uncommon. She has a tendency to deflect, to side step things he wants to talk about. She can be cold sometimes. That cruel bit of her heart that she wears like armor never was fully cut out. She always wants to be in control, to have the upper hand. He gets angry with her, yells, curses, and then he finds her later, and he apologizes, or she does in her own way, and he kisses her until their lips are purple. The feeling doesn’t normally phase him. 

He’s never felt it like this, though. Never such a cold anger as he climbs the steps to their chambers two at a time, rushing past the young desperate-looking boy stationed at the entrance and letting the door slam shut behind him. Maester Perbrook turns to look at him, eyebrows raised. “My Lord, I was just instructing my Lady that she ought to get some rest at this time -”

“Leave us.” Gendry’s voice is low, and he thinks this might be the first solid command he’s ever given. It doesn’t feel right, but it works. The maester bows his head and exits the room hurriedly, leaving him to stare at his petulant wife, crossed arms and defiant gaze, propped up in bed in the middle of the day.

He tries to take several deep breathes before speaking, tries not to explode the way he wants to. She knows how to tug on his strings just the wrong way.

“You shouldn’t have left your meeting. There’s too much to do,” she says.

“Are you _joking_?” He seethes. He funnels his itching energy into a pace, long strides back and forth at the foot of their bed. “Is this a _joke_ to you?”

Her eyes narrow, and he knows she does not appreciate his tone. Right now he can’t bring himself to bloody fucking care. “I don’t find this funny at all, actually,” she replies cooly.

He stops his pace to face her, hoping she feels the heat of the fire he thinks he’s radiating. “How many months have you been pregnant, Arya?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” she snaps.

“Then don’t _act like you’re stupid_ ,” he hisses, unable to face her any longer. He returns to pacing. He runs a hand over his head as if it could calm the storm in his mind. “Charging a group of bandits on your own when you’ve a child in your belly is a pretty fucking _stupid thing to do_.”

She glares at him with a force he’s never seen before, or at least that he’s never seen directed at him before. “You would have rather I turned around and left your people unattended, _my Lord?_ ”

“You should have come back, Arya, at the fucking _least_ , gotten someone to come help you or go back in your place -”

“And yet,” she seethes, her fury a kettle, whistling, dangerous, but contained. “There are no bandits to bother anyone any longer. The job is done.”

“I don’t -”

“You would have lost men. I spared you that eventuality.”

“ _I could have lost you!_ ”

She laughs and it is hard, humorless. “You know I don’t fall so easily.”

“But you did, didn’t you?” He demands, and every brick they’ve hurled at each other freezes in the air. The heat hangs in suspension. “Ser Andor told me you collapsed at the gate. Told him that someone had pulled you off your horse during the fight. Weren’t going to tell _me_ any of that, though, were you?”

“If I could have foretold this reaction, maybe I wouldn’t have come back at all,” she snaps, but a shadow crosses her face at the words, and he knows she’s sorry right away, sorry that she used one of his greatest fears like a weapon against him. He knows. It still hurts.

He deflates, all the fight leaving him. She has the upper hand again, somehow. She always seems to. He trudges slowly around the edge of their bed, drags a nearby chair over to her side. Plops himself down into it. She watches him with wary eyes.

“You’ve been on your own for so long,” he says, and he is surprised at the softness in his own voice, surprised that his pain breeds no bitterness in his words. “I know. I know what it’s like, to only have yourself. To only be able to depend on yourself. But that’s not what this is anymore.” He gestures to the room at large. “You aren’t alone. And you can’t - _we_ can’t afford for you to forget, Arya.” He looks pointedly at her stomach, only her stomach, no where else. He will not dare look at her face.

She’s quiet for quite some time. He doesn’t know if she’s still angry like she was, if her icy walls are building back up like they do when she’s heartsore and she doesn’t know how to verbalize it.

“I’m so scared,” she chokes, and he’s surprised when he looks up to see her eyes are wet. No anger, only sincerity on her face. “I’m so scared of forgetting what they taught me and how to move and of getting slow and careless and not being able to fight so that I won’t be able to protect her when she needs me to and when they come for us -” A sob swallows the rest of her words, but no tears are falling, she’s holding herself in _so much_ that he can tell that it hurts. He reaches out to her blindly, tears filling his own eyes. He tries to be like her, tries not to let them fall.

“No one’s coming for us,” he promises, taking her in his arms as tightly as he dares, painfully cognizant that he forgot in his rage to look her over for further injury. The way she clutches back lets him know her only hurt is one no one can see. “Not anymore.”

He holds her while she shakes, dry sounds tearing at the back of her throat. No tears fall. He holds her until she shakes herself silent, breathing heavy and stilted, but slower. He lies her back down and maneuvers himself over her so he’s lying down next to her, boots on his feet be damned. He doesn’t let go until her breathing is even and he’s sure she’s asleep.

He gets up to straighten things up around the room (and maybe in his mind, too). A chair put back in place, the drape caught in the door released. He stares at the empty fireplace a bit. Moves to his desk to put away his things, left there in a flurry.

“I didn’t even think I could get pregnant,” she says, jolting him. Not so asleep after all, then. 

He stops shuffling the papers on his desk and looks up at her. “Why?”

Her hand drifts over a certain part of her abdomen, a part that he is very intimately acquainted with, having tried to pour all of his love onto it, for all the hatred it showed. The scars from Braavos. Her punishment for crimes of defiance against death. 

“I thought there was no way she missed my womb. No possible way.”

——

It’s towards the end of the fourth month when he finds her seated by the window in their chambers, clutching the smallest scroll he’s ever seen between her fingers, one hand over her now widely protruding stomach. Her brow is creased.

“What is it?” He asks. She throws the scroll out the window to the ocean below and stands, not without difficulty. She turns to him, and her eyes have that familiar shuttered look, like she’s forgotten that she’s safe now and it’s been years since the war and she has a husband that loves her and a town full of people that will protect her. 

“Not something I’ll fall for again,” she promises.

——

It had been a message from Braavos. An entreat from her old guild, claiming she belonged to them. A demand to return. Return or die. 

“They won’t give up,” he insists as he struggles to keep pace with her. She flies through the halls, looking for soldiers in particular, instructing them to assemble in the court. Instructions for each maid and serving boy, each apprentice. All preparations. 

“I know,” she says absently, eyes flitting back and forth from her last task to her next one. 

“Arya, if there is one thing I know about their attack style because of _you_ it’s that _you will not have a chance to fight back_ -”

“I know them,” she insists, pulling up short. “I know how they operate and this is not like them. If the Faceless Men want you dead, you do not know until you are dying.” She starts to walk again. “Something different is happening. And even if it were them, they can’t surprise me. Not anymore.”

— — 

She spends her days organizing. Organizing the financial records in their library, organizing the guardsmen into acceptable defensive positions, organizing her husband’s irritation from his fear. 

They rarely are able to sleep at the same time, him being too afraid to leave her bedside unattended despite her flawless defensive positions, but he’s always there when she falls asleep anyways, one hand massaging the ankle she had let slip was aching or just resting on her massively swollen middle. 

She’s afraid, too, but focusing on his fear gives her something to do, something to distract herself with. She’s afraid of the threat the Faceless Men pose to her home, to her family, maybe even herself, she’s afraid the winds are changing, and she’s afraid of how big her stomach is at only five months and how abnormal Maester Perbrook seems to think that it is, but mostly, she’s afraid that the universe has played another cruel joke on her, giving her this semblance of happiness for a single heart’s beat until it’s time for it to break again.

— — 

She is walking in the catacombs, the dull and cold stone tunnels that wind from the Storm’s End keep to the sea below. She needs air that is not stifling with heat and filled with concern. She needs to set preparations to leave Storm’s End, to draw the demons of her past away from the home and the people that she loves. She has decided this after a month of being selfish, a month of hoping to naively believe in systems rather than in herself.

It is on her dark and damp way down that she notices someone following her in the stony shadows. It is not easy to surprise her. She once would have said it was impossible to catch her off guard. With a stomach the abnormal size of a melon, however, it is rather a bit more difficult to carry around what she considers to be proper weaponry. How painfully she is aware, as she slips a steel dagger from the folds of her dress, that it is all she has. That she is far away from where anyone can hear her, should she need help. That she cannot currently fight like she ought to be able to. 

She continues to walk normally for a few paces, not granting her follower any inclination that she might be aware of their presence. A few steps more and she whirls, dagger raised. Immediately her steel is met with the clash of other metal, and a flame that she craves too deeply flicks at her veins. This is an attack. 

She forces the sword, the _entire broadsword_ back and knows she has to play this by eye, something she is more than accustomed to in the dark. There is no way a mere dagger can withstand the brutish force of a broadsword, so she must avoid, must twist and turn and calculate the perfect place to strike.

Her opponent is undoubtedly a man, abnormally tall and of athletic stature. She cannot see any defining features, no hair, no eyes, no expression. No face.

She side steps another lunge by the sword, and almost rather pities the attacker for having been the only one sent to kill her. One man alone, and someone had genuinely believed it would be enough to fell her. She steps some more, twists, turns. She avoids the weapon alright, but cannot find a chink in his spatial armor, cannot present an offense of her own. The way the sword is swinging almost makes her think that he is not aiming to kill, but she can think of no other reason for him to swing. She slashes at his bicep with her dagger and is unnerved that he makes no noise, mind flashing back to an opponent that felt no pain and had no flesh and only aimed to spread decay like a disease through her body. 

The hilt of the sword catches her in the rib when he turns to meet her and she grunts, using the momentum of his push to fling herself towards the ground and slash across his thighs. Blood pours, she is _certain_ , but it is no killing shot. She pushes herself up standing and the man is even closer than she realized, bearing down on her once again with the broadsword. The dagger will not hold. It is not holding. For every warrior cell she has in her body, she shrieks. She pushes against the metal, despite the bite at her muscles and the panic in her throat. She swears she sees a spark hop off of the place the two weapons meet.

The steel of her dagger screams in harmony with her muscles and all at once it’s too much, the burning and the screaming and the whistling of metal and her wrist that supports the dagger collapses. The dagger skids across the stone floor. She throws her hands up as a last line of defense, and her assailant’s hand grabs at her fingers, grabs for purchase. She cannot feel it.

All she feels, so suddenly and terrifyingly sharp, is a quick blow of the flat of the sword against her stomach. She cannot breathe. She falls back against the stone, suffocating in fear in a way that she has not since her hair was ripped from her head and her name stripped from her soul. Her hand raises to her stomach, and she prays for a sign, some way to know her baby is unharmed. Something hard and long cracks against the side of her skull. Her vision goes black.

— —

When she blinks her eyes open, she gags. A wave of nausea reminiscent of the strong Storm’s End tide threatens to overwhelm her, and she shoves the need to vomit deep down into her chest. Her head pounds like her husband’s hammer on the anvil, and the smell of rotting fish fills her nose. None of this is most concerning to her.

Most concerning is that when she blinks her eyes open, she still sees nothing.

Every part of her that is still the blind and starving child from her past screams, but she does not, will not let herself, even as she comes to realize that she feels cloth over her eyes, that even in this total darkness she can tell something lies beyond it. She is blindfolded.

Her wrists, she realizes, are enclosed in chains tighter than she’s ever felt before. No broken thumbs will be getting her out of these metal links. They must be made for children, she thinks, and it’s never filled her with such dread as it does now. Her arms are pulled behind her, resting around a wooden post. She is seated with her back against the post. The floor rocks beneath her, and she knows she is on a ship. Anything else she cannot ascertain about her surroundings. 

She is blind again.

“A girl sleeps for many days,” a voice breaks the silence, and she stills, every muscle in her body pulled taut and ready because she _knows_ the voice. “Many days on our journey and I have wished to hear her voice.”

“How many days,” she demands, voice hoarse.

No answer meets her ears. Instead, footsteps. Boots on a wooden plank. Pacing. 

“We will play a game,” the man says. Her stomach rolls.

“Tell me what you want,” she insists, using the post at her back to lift herself to her feet. She tries so desperately not to let on how she is scrambling for purchase, tries to determine how close the man is and if she can just get her knee into his gut -

“A game,” says the man sharply, and something stings, hot and throbbing, against her upper arm. His weapon is a staff, no thicker around than her wrist. She understands the strike as a promise of more to come. Doesn’t really care.

But she will not play his game again. Not when she has so much to loose this time.

“I have no debt to pay,” she says softly. “What’s mine is mine now. Tell me why I’m here.”

A sharp _crack_ against her shoulder, the resounding of wood and bone. She ignores the stars in her eyes. “ _Tell me_.”

The man does not answer for a long time. He stays perfectly still, making no noise, making no movement. She thinks for a second he’s trying to catch her unawares, as if someone trained by him could be caught unaware.

She feels him moving, but can do nothing. He gets closer and closer, breath hot and heavy, and scent not at all like she remembers it. People change, she supposes. And so do their methods.

His hand wraps around her throat like a vice, squeezing just enough that she cannot hope to breathe and cannot hope to stop him. “A girl must remember her place,” he hisses, too close to her face, she can feel his spittle, and this _isn’t him_ , this is too much change and something’s wrong, not the way it used to be -

The staff finds the target of its next blow and an enraged cry drags raw from her throat. Across her rounded stomach, a fierce red welt begins to rise. In her chest, her panic begins to bubble. In her womb, her child shifts.

“A girl breaks the rules. Only a man may ask questions,” he says, releasing her throat and stepping back, and she wishes more than anything she could see the coldness in his eyes, wishes she had that to fuel her flames of vengeance.

“A girl has always broken the rules of men,” she spits out.

He does not answer before he leaves the room, leaves her to her darkness. She sinks to her knees and tries to stop the shuddering breaths filling her lungs from turning into sobs.

— —

She feels so stupid. She doesn’t understand anything that’s happening. For all she’s always been able to work things out, now she is completely dumbfounded. Now, when it matters most.

The ship creaks on and on. She can’t fully estimate how much time has passed, but if she had to guess, she’d say four days since she had woken. She still has no idea how long she was unconscious. They haven’t removed the blindfold from her eyes. She has tried everything to dislodge it, rubbed her face against her shoulders and the post and the floor, but it seems to be pinned to her hair with something and tied ever so tightly. No matter what she does, it does not move.

Someone brings her bread and cheese once a day, a chamber pot twice. Neither of these is enough.

The man has returned only to ask her benign questions about her life since Braavos. How she earned the title The Bringer of Dawn. How she survived the burning of King’s Landing. How she sailed west. How she returned with maps of a world undiscovered. How she serviced at Oldtown for a time, describing foreign cultures of the West. How she rode to Storm’s End. Decided to stay there. How she wed the Lord of the castle. 

When she refuses to answer a question, something hard and solid makes connection with her stomach. Sometimes a boot. Usually his staff. She tries very hard not to refuse.

— —

She tries asking him a question again, one day. “Why send me the scroll? Why give any hint you were coming for me?”

He does not answer. “Why did a girl marry the Baratheon man?”

“Because that’s what girls do. They marry.” A blow to her upper arm. She will not give him the satisfaction of a reaction.

“Why him?”

“Because he was there.” Another, this time to her ribs. A sharp pain radiates across her torso and she’s certain one has cracked.

“What has he given to the girl?” A home, a life, a love. None of these she can say. Thinking of him puts a crack in her heart to match the one on her ribs. Her fear wells up unbidden at the thought of him, struggling to find her and pulling the strings of the wrong people and ending up with an arrow through his knee or his chest or poisoned or bludgeoned or _buried_ —

“More than your slimy Braavosi guild ever could have.” A mistake. She shouldn’t have spoken out of emotion. The man taught her this. But it seems he is determined to continue to surprise her.

The next blow lands on her skull, just above her ear. She fades even before the staff moves away from her scalp.

— —

He shivers with fear and rage. None of this makes sense. At first he thought she had just left. Some stupid noble notion in her head about keeping him safe. That had been before they’d found her blood in the catacombs, though. 

And now he’s on a fucking ship to Braavos, tossing and tumbling through the waves like he never thought he’d have to again. His stomach crawls more with each passing day, sea sickness and gut-wrenching fear coalescing as two sweet sisters in his belly. 

He travels with about 3,000 men, all prepared for a battle that he knows they could not hope to win against an invisible enemy. In his panicked frenzy before setting sail, he shakily penned ravens to Bran and Sansa, begging Bran to tell him where she was, begging Sansa for resources to find her, begging the Starks to remember their pack.

Sansa offers a subtle tracking envoy sent to Braavos ahead of his fleet to scope out the situation and see if they couldn’t locate her first. Bran offers men to fight, but cannot tell him where she is. Something about the wood surrounding her being unfamiliar, something about time shifting before his eyes, obscuring her image. He doesn’t care.

She’s a fighter. He knows that. She took care of herself when he was there to stand beside her in their battering childhood, and knows she survived during the years he wasn’t there to stand with her, to the East or to the West. The knowledge does nothing to soothe the iron fist clamped inside his chest at all times. He also saw how she’d been walking recently, contorted by irregular aches and pains and not as quick, for all she tried to hide it. She’s a fighter, but she’s not just herself right now. She can’t be a fighter when she’s also her child.

He’s a fucking idiot, not expecting this. The Faceless Men had _told_ them they were coming for her. And instead of actually doing anything about it, he stood by the window like a fool. Now he stands on the deck of a ship, watching endless water roll itself into the distance, and nothing has changed. He is still a damned fool who is powerless to help his wife, powerless to do anything but wait.

— —

He punches the wall of his cabin and gets splinters. It’s stupid and the first mate who helps him patch it up grumbles, but it kind of makes him feel real again, if just for a second.

— —

He has nightmares of her lifeless body. He can’t reach out to touch her or move at all or call her name, he can only stare at her corpse, a trickle of blood coming from her mouth and a stream from between her legs. Her stomach is flat. He stares for hours and cries when he wakes up.

— —

They storm into the room in a flurry one day, but it feels organized, planned. She gets a shock when the chains holding her arms break apart, still enclosing her wrists but no longer connected. She wretches her arms forward and tries to break free, only to be met with the forceful hilt of a blade against the small of her back. The blow knocks all the breath out of her, and in her winded state they reattach her chains. She feels the sharp point of a sword scrape across her stomach. “Move forward,” a voice that sounds hauntingly like the Lady Crane says, and she will not let her baby die, so she does.

— —

They’ve taken her off the ship, somewhere on solid ground that’s unbearably hot even in the dark recesses of whatever place they’ve put her (a cell, she assumes). Her hands are still bound behind her, but she is not constrained to one place and can instead move around freely in her tiny space. It helps her think, this elbow room, makes her feel like she has control over any aspect of her life, anything that’s going on, even if it’s just walking. 

They told her they were in Braavos, but she doesn’t begin to believe it. It’s far too hot here to be a northern port city, and though she cannot estimate the time she was unconscious on the ship, surely it had not been enough time to sail to Braavos. 

Surely she couldn’t be that far from anyone who could help.

— —

She is so hungry. 

When she is next brought food, she does everything in her power to not seem like she’s begging. 

“You can’t feed a pregnant woman table scraps,” she snaps at whoever stands before her. “I need food for my baby to survive.”

“It does not matter if the baby survives,” the voice of a girl, probably younger, comes. These men and their damned _girls_. She was that, once.

“Then why isn’t it dead yet?” Arya whispers. Her throat hurts from not enough water and too much squeezing.

The girl does not answer, but pushes bread into Arya’s mouth. She wants to scream, but she chews, because chewing is survival and if there is one thing she has to pass onto a child, a single legacy, it is knowing how to survive.

— —

She aches so terribly. She has no idea how long she’s been here, how many unprompted blows she’s received from the Man’s staff.

She realizes now that he is not the Man she thought she knew. He had the voice of Jaqen H’ghar, undoubtedly, but taking prisoners was not the way of the Faceless Men, nor was lashing out and losing control at jibes, letting emotion best you. He must have a trick of his voice, must be using a ghost from her past to haunt her present. The only thing she can’t figure is why. 

To her, he is a different kind of faceless. Instead of many, he has none.

— —

Sansa’s envoy meets them at a minor port city south of Braavos, a small discrete ship containing but five men, all ashen faced and wide eyed. 

He doesn’t bother greeting them when they stand on the docks together. “Any news?” His voice sounds like he hasn’t used it in weeks. He doesn’t think he has.

For a moment, none of then speak. Then a stout, shorter man with yellow hair steps forward, his lips slightly gapping and his eyes flitting nervously. “Much news, my Lord.”

Gendry opens his arms in an impatient gesture. “Well?”

The man tries many times to stutter out whatever it is he has to say, fumbling through sentence fragments and not even trying to be direct about the subject at hand. Gendry’s sure his fury lights up his face.

“The House of Black and White is no more, my Lord,” a different young man from the group speaks up, much taller than the other, if not a bit gangly. His red hair is short and his brown eyes do not waver from Gendry’s.

“What does that mean?” Gendry snaps. He’ll never bloody get to her at this rate.

“There are no more Faceless Men.” The man licks his lips, swallows. “They are all dead.”

— — 

“What of this rival guild?”

His hands are planted on either side of a map, his head bowed in frustration.

“The Founders, they call themselves. Fervent followers of a God of Beginnings. We’ve heard talk that they themselves wiped out the Faceless Men.”

His mind reels. The people that trained _Arya Stark_ , the fiercest and deadliest fighter he knew, had been demolished? How could that be possible? How could anyone possess more skill than them?

“It was a numbers matter, I believe. The people were losing faith in the Faceless Men and turned against them, putting their support behind these rivals. They’re highly skilled, but not as subtle as the Faceless Men. I think that could be used to our advantage,” suggests the red-haired man from earlier. 

Gendry’s eyes narrow. His jaw clenches. “Find me one of them and bring them here.”

— —

The stone floor is hard, hard and cold, where the air is stifling and thick and filled with heat. She is glad for the reprieve from hot breaths, glad something grounds her to the reality of her situation better than a hazy mind and aching ankles. 

She spends her days sweating and wishing she could see, but she learned long ago that wishing didn’t get you anywhere, so she does what she can to keep moving, even if it means quiet latent exercises in her corner that serve to pronounce the press in her stomach. She moves at a snails pace, but her mind moves faster. She’s figuring them out, little by little.

The man with Jaqen H’ghar’s voice is their leader, judging by the way the others speak of him. They are pious in whatever religion they follow, they do not have very big cells at their disposal, they can imitate any sound (the whistling of steel, they’ve made her flinch for the fun of it), they endlessly reference “beginnings.” It terrifies her to think it might have something to do with the birth of her child. 

They’re a pattern, a finely linked chain. All she needs to break it is a weak spot.

— —

They toss the man onto the chair in front of him like a flour sack, hands bound behind his back, but Gendry can’t really find it in himself to verify that validity of the man’s identity before his fist is flying. His fingers connect with bone and he feels like a madman when the resounding _crunch_ soothes his frayed nerves. The man coughs.

“Where are the Faceless Men?” Gendry demands.

The man looks up through a haze of blood, not really looking surprised, but not so willing to give information, either. “Gone,” he spits.

Gendry hits him again, making sure to aim for his nose as crooked as possible. “Then _who took Arya Stark_?”

The man does not answer, only stares ahead sourly. Gendry grabs him by the front of his tunic, drags him up to his level. “Where is she?” He all but roars, and when he receives no answer, his fist flies again, indiscriminate in its target, pulling back, pushing forward, wailing like a hammer on anvil against the body in front of him, over and over and over until someone grabs him by the shoulders and forces him back, leaving the bloodied man to fall back half-dead to his chair, seemingly unconscious. Gendry leaves the room without even turning to see who stopped him.

— —

“Dorne!” The man finally relents.

They’ve been questioning him for a week with no success. He has said nothing. Hit after hit after tactic after tactic and Gendry almost can’t bring himself to be in the room anymore when the man finally breaks, finally decides that he’s had enough. 

“The Founders have taken her to Dorne,” he wheezes his confession. “They took her to Firecrawl, east of The Tor.”

“Why?” He feels closer to her than he has in weeks.

“To prepare,” the man says, a wild fervor lighting his eyes. 

“For _what_?” He punctuates his words with another reeled fist.

“For the coming of the child! The child of the Nightslayer who will bring eternal Dawn!”

He lets the fist fly for good measure.

— —

His toes tap anxiously against the wooden floor. Weeks. It’s taken them _weeks_ to get down to Dorne, all because they went in the wrong fucking direction at the start of their search. He supposes that was the The Founder’s goal all along. He can’t help but think about how Arya must have changed in the time, growing larger and larger with his child. Maybe getting sicker. Definitely bearing it all on her own. His stomach lurches at the thought, but there’s nothing he can do to shake it, so he uses it. Uses it to push him forward and up onto the deck and to speak orders to his crew, to give the direction to be discreet. They have a better chance of getting her out if they go unnoticed. 

Before he knows they’ve taken a dinghy to shore, they’ve snuck onto the castle grounds, they’ve ducked behind stone walls and eyed an imposing yellow castle, they’ve dodged men in red marching around the grounds, and one of his idiot, _idiot_ soldiers has let his sword clatter to the ground, alerting The Founder’s of their presence.

All hell breaks loose.

— — 

They come rushing into her cell with fumbling hands and clanging keys and unlike the last time, Arya can tell this move is not planned. There is an air of panic around the two figures who firmly clasp her arms and shove her forward, presumably out the cell door. They carry her forward at a breakneck pace and she can hear shouting from quite a distance, maybe even the hit of two swords, and her heart bursts. Someone is here, enemy of her captors so an ally of hers. They are trying to draw her away from the noise, to remove her from the vicinity of the fight where they know she’s strongest. Smart.

Not smart enough to stop her, though.

They’re worried. They’re tense, panicked, not thinking clearly. She does nothing but pay attention, and the second one of them loses their grip, startled from a loud sound towards the fighting, she’s on him. 

She reclaims blindness as her own, as her strength. She reaches down to grab whatever’s sheathed at his hip, for there _has_ to be something, she felt it knocking against her in their rush, and plunges it into what she thinks is his heart. The other figure yanks her arm so hard she’s sure her shoulder pops out of its socket and goes to grab at her hair, but she is too fast. She twists and maneuvers the blade up against him, and he has no time to stop it. It’s a sloppy slash, but it does the job. She hears a gurgling sound where she cut his throat, feels his blood splatter warm over her front, and his hands fall away from her. She stumbles for a few paces and finds a wall, leaning against it and giving herself a moment to gasp. Her trembling fingers reach up towards the cloth covering her eyes. They shift it, move it off, and she squints, harsh light drawing tears from the corners even though the only thing she feels like doing right now is laughing. When she’s collected herself and readjusted her irises to the light (she still has to keep a hand over her forehead, it’s probably going to be some time until she’s completely alright), she turns around, steps over the bodies she made, and walks towards the fight.

— —

She swoops through the hallways with her strange, curved sword like an avenging angel more than seven months thick with child. She slices with all the rage she’s felt bubbling in her for the past months, felling men for every hand laid against her. She dodges and side steps and twists and she’s not as nimble as she once was, but she’s angrier than she’s ever been, and that helps. She kills another man, heads to find someone who can help.

— —

The doors in front of her clearly lead to a throne room of sorts. It’s been boarded up and sealed, perhaps protecting those inside deemed too important to fight. From the way her blood heats up, Arya can feel in her gut that the man she is looking for is in that room. She glances around the corridor for another way in, and doesn’t take to long to spot the unassuming portion of wall that’s cut out in the shape of a door. She pushes it gently and it swings open easily. 

She makes her way into the dark, not moving as swiftly as she’d like, but not unaccustomed to shadow. The passageway leads her up a ways to what she assumes is the back of the throne room, and then veers both left and right. To the left, another pathway. To the right, a door. She chooses the door.

— —

Men rush at her from all angles. She thinks of the child she is to birth and the harm they have already done to it, the damage they have already inflicted. She thinks of each blow she has sustained in her lifetime, each enemy, how they have fallen. She thinks of her own mother, who had no more power in protecting her than she does in protecting her child. She decides this trait will carry through her family line no longer. She decides the mothers in her family from now on will carry with them the power to protect the ones they love.

The men do not continue to rush her for long.

— —

A man stands behind all the rest, waiting at the foot of a few stairs that lead up to a throne of sorts, wooden, not too flashy, but quietly imperious. His hands are folded over the hilt of a blade, resting in front of him. He looks far too calm as he surveys the battle before him. One woman against many men. Many men falling.

When Arya finally reaches him, he smiles. She pauses a moment, eyeing him warily, her chest heaving and adrenaline pouring through her like liquid lightning. “So many moons, and still so strong,” he murmurs, a quiet awe in his eyes.

She hears the voice when she’s a child, when she is a young girl, when she is blindfolded in the hold of a ship. When a boot connects with her stomach. When a staff connects with her shoulder. Before her stands the man with Jaqen H’ghar’s voice, but not his face. He is tall, much taller, almost unnaturally so. His skin is pale as milk, so stiff and sallow that he seems almost unhealthy, if not for the bright glint in his dark eyes. He wears red, only red, and Arya just now takes notice that every man she has killed tonight was also wearing red, only red. 

He continues to smile at her. It exacerbates her fury. She lets lose a scream and charges at him with her new strange curved blade. He side steps easily and does not move to attack her again. She swings at him, he jumps out of the way. He does not try to take the offense.

“Why?” She cries, swinging as wild as a Westerosi knight with a broadsword. “Why attack me like that for all that time and now keep your distance? Why not _face me?_ ”

The man dances out of her reach and turns back to her, spreading his hand. “All to keep a girl in line. Her baby must not really be harmed.”

“Why - do you want - my - baby?” She roars, every word a would-be blow. He continues to evade her.

“You killed the Night King,” he says simply, and he no longer has the voice of a ghost from her past, no longer speaks like it. It is deeper, less accented. Not a trace of her tormentor is left. She freezes. “You are the Ender of Night. Your child is _destined_ to be the Bringer of Dawn.”

Her eyes narrow. She swings the sword around in her hand as best she can. “New beginnings?”

He nods, his grin widens. “So you see. My people are the shifters of the earth. We move from person to person and place to place, ensuring that the world turns round. We are promised in a prophecy older than you or I that a new leader will bring an Eternal Dawn, an eternal beginning. It is you. It is your child. You are to birth the true heir of The Founder’s.”

Her blood stops moving in her veins at his words. “And the Faceless Men?”

The man’s smile tightens for the first time. “All together too obsessed with endings, wouldn’t you say?”

She lunges again.

— —

He swings his hammer the only way he knows how, like someone born to create and destined to destroy. He clears his own path to her, he _knows_ she’s here. She has to be. Why else would the guard be so heavy? They want her, need her for something. That has to mean she’s alive, it _has_ to. 

His men are overtaking the corridor, so he moves onto the next where two giant doors are bolted shut. He lets loose a yell as he swings on, hoping that Arya can hear.

— —

The man starts to defend himself. Even starts to take the offensive. She won’t give up, and she can tell it’s frustrating him. The fire in her veins gives her license; she whips around him like her old self, like she’s not with child, like she hasn’t been chained in a single room and beaten for weeks. She’s free to be every bit of wild she always dreamed.

He’s deft with a blade, able to almost predict her moves, but she’s fast. She learned from the people he hates so much. She becomes what he hates. He tries to bring the hilt down onto her shoulder, but he doesn’t want to actually kill her, wants to preserve the baby, and for the first time, it is him who becomes weak for the child. She knocks his blade from his hands and thrusts hers solidly against his eyes. He screams, clawing at the blade as she drags it away. Blood pours down his face, and he sees no longer.

She leans closer to him as he panics, falling to his knees, screaming, scrambling for sight. “Not so much better than a blindfold, is it?”

He wails, pitiful, dropping his hands to the ground. “Have mercy,” he pleads, “for the sake of the great child that you carry within you. It is the future of my people.”

She pulls him up by the hair, placing her blade at his Adam’s apple, looking straight ahead, not down, not down. “Your people have no future,” she says, blank, empty. “There will be no more beginnings for The Founder’s. I am their end.”

She slices his throat.

— —

He swings the door open with every bit of might everyone always said he had to see her standing in front of a throne, absolutely covered in blood, incomprehensibly giant at her middle with child, and torn apart. Her hair hangs in gnarled strands around her face and her chest heaves. Not another man stands in the room, a blade hanging from her fingers. He can’t help but grin as he moves to walk towards her. Of course she’d found a way to go and be the hero again, the infallible ineffable Arya Stark, the Bringer of Dawn, the Ender of the Long Night -

He hears a faint rush and sees her look down. Liquid rapidly stains the front of her already filthy dress and runs down the sides, creating grotesque spindly patterns. She presses a hand to her stomach and cries out. He is by her side in time to catch her when she collapses.

— —

He is afraid to lift her for fear of disrupting the process, but knows they cannot stay here. He turns to his first mate. “Find a midwife, tell her we will pay whatever necessary for her to return to the Stormlands with us. Anything. _Find one_.”

— —

“It’s too soon,” she panics deliriously. “Too soon.” 

It hurts that the first words she’s able to speak to him after a separation of uncountable weeks are ones of fear. He can feel the pounding of his heart so acutely in time with hers because he _knows_ , knows there’s supposed to be more than a month before she’s truly ready to birth the child. It hurts more to see her like this, writhing on the bed in the captain’s quarters of his ship, visible body entirely _littered_ with marks, arms covered in bruise, blood crusting across her entire person that he can’t distinguish as being hers or not.

He grips her hand tight and squeezes his eyes shut when he presses lips to her knuckles. “I know. It’ll be okay, love, I promise.”

She shakes her head fervently, over and over again, not opening her eyes. Sweat gleans off her forehead. Her movements are fevered and frenzied as she tosses and turns. Her hair is matted and her skin sallow, hanging off of her like a cloth draped over a piece of furniture. An unconscious tear rolls down the side of her face as she cries out again, clutching at her abdomen. He swipes it away and then swipes at his own, leaning down to lay his forehead on hers as she struggles.

“I’m sorry. I’m here. I’m here. I’m _sorry_.”

— —

A midwife comes, older and surly looking, but willing. She demands the first mate get her fresh water, a steward bring her any clean fabric he can find. She levels Gendry with a fierce gaze.

“Not so traditional for the husband to be in the birthing room, is it?”

His grip on Arya tightens. “I won’t leave her.”

The midwife nods and gets to work. “Good.”

— —

She pushes fervently, finally able to take action after enduring contractions for several hours, having regained enough bearing of her surroundings to understand that it is solely up to her in this moment. Gendry doesn’t want to look because it looks so _horrible_ and he can’t imagine a pain worse than this, but he doesn’t not want to look because if _she_ has to endure it, why shouldn’t he? In the end he chooses to watch her face, and makes her watch his so she won’t see the strange mix of fluid and blood pouring out of her body. He tries to etch every hour of love he’s ever felt for her into the lines on his face, as if that could do something to relieve her pain. 

He’s never seen a woman give birth, but he’s heard it. No one he’s heard has screamed this loud.

— —

“My Lord,” comes the midwife’s voice, and Arya drops herself back down onto the flimsy pillow, gasping for breath and barely conscious. Gendry turns around to face the midwife, who holds a filthy pink thing in her arms. Her brow is furrowed as she looks first at the babe, and then up at him. “I’m so sorry.”

His soul freezes. His mind freezes, his heart freezes, time freezes. In the distance, Arya begins to wail again. He takes one step, then another towards the creature, its little closed eyes, its bloody and still chest. He reaches out to touch it but finds he can not bear to, thinks he might drop dead to join it. The midwife jostles it a bit, but there is nothing akin to a reaction. The girl is stillborn.

The midwife turns to place her in a blanket in the corner, wrapping her up for his benefit, but he can’t tear is eyes from the bundle nonetheless, a thousand possible lifetimes for the child flashing before his eyes. Would she have run in the fields by his Keep, made friends with the cook’s children? Would she have loved to swim at the beach in the summer and been impossibly comfortable in the winter, like her mother? Would she have black hair and grey eyes or blue eyes and a crooked smile or -

When the midwife is back at the foot of the bed, her eyes widen as she looks down on Arya. “My Lord.” He looks down and sees what she sees, the beginnings of a second little head pushing its way out of his wife. Arya screams again.

“There’s another!”

— —

The second one lives. The midwife rinses it and swaddles it before returning it to him, placing it in his arms.

“One healthy babe, my Lord. That is more than some can wish for,” says the midwife. He holds her delicately, not sure how to keep his grip on her without hurting her, astonished by the glow she seems to radiate. She’s the tiniest thing he’s ever laid eyes on, so tiny he feels he could break her in half just by shifting his hands. For a moment, everything in the world fades away and it is just him, brawn and brute and every ounce of stupid he’s ever been, holding a daughter that he has something to _give_. Anything. He’d give her anything, the moon and stars and sun and sky if she asked. All in a second’s breath, he is hopelessly devoted to the writhing bundle in his arms.

He is yanked harshly back into reality when he turns, intending to share this moment with Arya, to find her eyes still half-lidded, her breathing shallow. “It should have stopped,” the midwife exclaims lowly. She is staring at the heavy flow of blood still running from between Arya’s legs. 

Gendry can only blink before turning to stumble out of the cabin. He hurriedly hands his child to his first mate, who waits at the door. “Keep her safe,” he hisses, and he has no option but to leave her and go back inside.

The midwife is now frantically fluttering around the room, and Gendry gags at the scent of _so much blood_ , enough to kill any man, wrung outside of the body where it had no right to be. He rushes to her, tries to help the midwife press cloths against her bloodied center to stem the flow. She sits a bath of her own blood, it sloshes as the ship lurches, and he can’t feel his tongue or his eyes or his feet because none of him belongs to him anymore, he belongs to her, and if she dies he’ll go with her, his soul will jump overboard and follow her, just like he promised. 

“Arya,” he whispers. “Arya. Open your eyes.”

“She can’t,” the midwife snaps, movements still frantic and lightning fast as she grapples with things Gendry doesn’t understand.

“Arya,” he begs, ignoring her. “Please.”

His hands are covered in her blood, stained. They shake. “ _Arya_. Wake _up_.”

— —

After minutes that feel like hours, the midwife is somehow able to stop the bleeding. It’s a miracle, she says of herself. There’s no way that anyone should be alive after loosing that much blood.

“She’s always had a tendency to defy the odds,” he says back to her.

He prays to whichever god that will listen that he’s right.

— —

Arya does not wake the duration of their trip back to Storm’s End. When his living daughter is hungry, the midwife helps her suckle her sleeping mother. He sits by her bedside, willing her to live another day, telling her that the worst of the danger is behind them and she can rest easy in his arms again. She doesn’t seem to hear him.

“She will wake, won’t she?” He asks, already knowing it’s a stupid question.

The midwife gives him a look. She does not want to answer. “Only time will tell, I suppose.”

— —

They have a funeral for the lost daughter. They don’t have much more than a crate, so they set her, swaddled, to drift off into the waters, a flaming arrow sparking her casket into ashes. 

He names her Cassandra as she drifts away, though he doesn’t know why. 

Maybe so he has something to call the ache in his heart. 

— —

There is much commotion when they arrive home, Arya having to be transported to their chambers, the question of where the child should go still hanging in the air. 

“A nursery, my Lord? Shall I see that one is set up?” Questions a squire, seeming to struggle in keeping with Gendry’s pace.

Gendry shakes his head, chest tightening at the thought of being too far apart from her. “A cradle in our own chambers is all.” He pauses thoughtfully. “And a wet nurse, if you can find one.”

— —

He sits by the side of her bed ( _their_ bed, the bed that they share) every second that he can get away from his responsibilities. He’s never cared either way for pessimism or optimism, just pushing through as best he could, but his hope is snuffing out. Blood loss makes her skin pale as the snow she was born from. Her eyes move under her lids, like she is seeing some world that he cannot. He hopes it’s kinder to her than the one he’s in.

The extent of her injuries is even worse than he had realized initially, barring the nearly disastrous childbirth. The maester had visibly deflated when he came to see her, for she was supposed to be untouchable, wasn’t she? Her arms are covered up and down with yellow and purple and black bruise, her wrists circles of bloodied and raw skin. A dark circle around her neck, the shape of hands squeezing. A thick slice on her collarbone had seemed to be infected. Several of her ribs were broken, and another large bloody bruise was hidden under her hair by her ear.

The maester had touched Gendry’s shoulder in an uncharacteristically gentle gesture before he left.

He almost wishes he could will the men that did this to her alive again, only if he could give her the satisfaction of the slow deaths that they deserve. He wonders if he doesn’t deserve it too, if he’s as much at fault as anyone who laid a hand to her.

He knows they threatened the babes to keep her in line. How else would she have been subdued? It’s exactly what she feared, having to look out for someone else, compromising herself because of it.

His daughter (who he would _not_ name without her, not yet) occupies his thoughts as he slides his face into his hands. He hopes she’ll look like Arya, not him. He hopes she’ll be happy with them. He hopes that he will do right by her. He vows that whatever she wants to be, he will let her be it. She will have no confines to her person, not like her mother or father. He hopes she’ll have a mother at all.

“Gendry.”

He almost misses it. So hoarse and shallow a whisper that he pauses, straining his ears to see if another will confirm it wasn’t just a trick of his over-tired and yearning mind.

“Gendry.” More solid this time. He looks up. Her eyes are open, and somehow awake she looks impossibly smaller against the frame of the bed. He doesn’t hesitate in pushing forward to crouch over her, trembling hands reaching for whatever part of her he dares, her shoulder, her cheek, her neck. Her eyes are clouded, not fully awake, as if she’s still trying to understand where she is. “We’re home?” She asks, the ring around her throat seeming to make speaking painful.

He nods, his own eyes flitting desperately in between hers, though he’s not sure what he’s so desperate for now that she’s woken. “Home. We’re home,” he manages, his own voice thick for entirely different reasons.

She shifts slightly beneath him and he doesn’t understand what she’s doing until he sees her eyes sharpen and her breath catch. Her arm is over her stomach, a lot more empty than it was the last time she was awake. “Where is she?”

His tongue feels too heavy in his mouth to answer. He’s too overwhelmed at the sound of her voice and at the feeling of her heartbeat, her _so alive_ heartbeat under his fingertips. “Arya -“

“ _Where is she_?” She is struggling to get up, to move past him, but she’s too hurt, she’s too precious to be so hurt so he pushes her back down as gently as he can manage. “ _Where is she_?” She shrieks, and she strikes him to try and push him out of the way. She’s fighting him claw and tooth, and it hurts more than her scraping nails to feel how weak she is against him, how sluggish her movements are and how she can’t hurt him now like she always could have. 

“She’s - Arya, _listen_ \- she’s okay! She’s safe. She’s here, she’s safe.”

“Where,” she demands, still fighting, still trapped in the world behind her eyelids where men who touch her do it to hurt her. He grabs her flying wrists and she gasps and he lets go, remembering the raw skin, and she uses them to lash out again and he doesn’t know how to stop her from hurting herself. 

“She’s in the next room with a wet nurse. She’s feeding. She’ll be back in a few minutes. She’s safe.” She’s still fighting, still defending herself against an enemy that is no longer there, and he doesn’t know what to do besides pull her to him, thrashing and all, pressed tightly against his chest.

Her breath is ragged and her movements slow, a single hit more, before she collapses into him. She shakes so ferociously. He tightens his arms, despite her injuries, trying to still her. She breathes heavy into his hold and his eyes squeeze shut. He holds the back of her head with his hand. She holds his own heart in her chest. “You’re safe,” he whispers ragged, _promising_ , promising. “We’re safe.” He rocks her as if he’s holding his daughter, whispering into her hair.

Safe, safe, safe, safe.

As if he hadn’t promised that before. 

As if he hadn’t been wrong.

— —

“Don’t bring her back here.” Her flat voice surprises him. She’s been quiet for a while now, having finally settled in his arms, having finally seen the truth of things. “I don’t - I need to rest, I think.”

He’s a bit bewildered, for not moments before she had flown into a rage over their daughter’s absence. She’s right, though. She needs to rest. She needs the time to heal. So he nods, traces his hand up her spine. “Alright.” 

— —

When it gets dark, she insists on keeping the candles lit. He sits with her until she’s drifted and reaches to blow them out so he can sleep too and she jolts wide awake, screams in the darkness.

They leave the candles burning after that.

— —

She’s sat up in bed this time when he walks in, gaze flitting over some different parchments in her lap. Always trying to throw herself back into work. He hesitates at the doorway, wants to be certain she’s aware of him, wants to be certain he’s allowed in this invisible defensive circle she’s erected around herself. 

“You just going to stand there?” She says, not looking up from the papers in her hand. He sighs and moves forward, that chair by her bedside looking more and more like a tombstone itself. 

He doesn’t say anything as he sits, doesn’t really know where to begin. He rubs his hands together and looks up at her, brow furrowed and still so concentrated on the papers before her. Maybe too concentrated.

“It’s been seven days,” he says. She does not stop reading. She does not want to hear. “Seven days since you gave birth to her.”

“I was there,” she bites back, but it holds no sting, none of the wild that she could put in it if she wanted to.

“Why won’t you see her?”

Arya pauses at the question. Seven days, and every time the wet nurse had prepared to return the child to its mother, Arya had refused to let her enter, had refused to even let her sleep in the room while she slept, ordering a nursery be set up. 

“Does it make you scared?” She murmurs. “A wife who won’t even love her own babe?”

His eyes narrow. “Won’t?”

“Can’t,” she amends.

“Won’t.”

She glares at him.

“Why?” He presses. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

She says nothing, just sits there with pursed lips and an upset in her throat and he’s had enough. He stands, hands brushing against thighs, and moves for the door. “I’m bringing her here.”

“Don’t,” Arya’s voice rings sharply across the room.

He whirls to face her. “You have to see her. You can’t pretend she doesn’t exist.”

“I’ll leave,” she threatens, eyes unguarded and wild in a way he can’t remember seeing since she was a child.

His temper snaps. “Oh, really? Leave then.” He crosses his arms over his chest. It’s a stupid thing to stay to her because he knows, he _knows_ she’ll try, but his anger and frustration are simmering to a boil in his blood and he lets it cloud his judgement for a second, lets it rule him.

She shoves the blankets and parchments aside and swings her legs over the side of the bed, and it only takes him that millisecond to realize how bad of an idea this is. It only takes her that long to set her feet down and try to take a step, too, before she collapses to her knees and doubles over with a grunt that he knows speaks multitudes of pain more than any cry would. 

He rushes for her and does his best to help her get up. She leans heavily on him, shaking with exertion even as she moves back to the bed. A piece of her hair sticks to her forehead. He brushes it away as she settles back down against the pillows, feeling terribly sorry for challenging her and for not being there when she needed him and for being helpless when she was giving birth to his child and also dying in the process, for -

“I’m scared of her.” 

He grips her elbows tightly, sighs. An arduous exhale. “It’s not her you’re scared of, love.” 

She stares ahead blankly. He sees her trying to shove everything she’s feeling back into her recesses. It’s working, but maybe it isn’t. “Please?” He begs her. He’s never been above begging her. She nods. It’s all he needs. He’s back on his feet in seconds.

— —

He gently places the bundle into her arms. Arya’s sat up again and her hair is falling out of its tie in stray strands around her face, and her gray eyes gaze down at the child they made together, and he has never thought her more beautiful than in this moment. He is overcome with love, overcome with her, leans down to press a kiss to her head.

She makes a strangled sound as he pulls away. 

Gendry has seen her cry before. He has seen sparse tears in the woods and in a muddy animal’s enclosure in Harrenhal, a stray one on her cheek before the Long Night and a few more stuck in her eyes after it. When her brother left and she left, when she came back to him and thought he wouldn’t love her anymore, when he did. 

He has seen her cry before, but never has he seen a person weep as Arya weeps now, leaning over and clutching her baby to her heart.

— —

They lie in bed, facing inwards towards the child that rests between them. Arya teases the folds of the baby’s swaddling with her finger, a small smile on her face. How strange, this feeling of utter devotion, of never wanting to be separated from someone. She had always wanted time alone, even time away from Gendry, for everything he meant to her. Not her daughter, though. Not anymore. Not since the first moment she held her in her arms, not since the first moment she felt like she finally had some control over protecting her again.

“Catelyn?” Gendry whispers low. His eyes are on the baby, too.

Arya shakes her head softly. “No.” She needs no reminders of the world she’s lost. Not when she has a new one, a whole entire new world lying on the bed next to her. But it’s his world too, she knows, so it has to mean something to him.

“What was your mother’s name?” She asks him. 

His brow furrows. “I don’t know.” 

She taps the fabric thoughtfully, humming low in her throat. “Stark and Baratheon. She needs to know that. She is both.”

He smirks a little. “All wolf and no fury, though?”

Arya shakes her head again. “All wolf, all fury. All of us.”

His eyes shine in the dimly lit room, and his words are an exhale. “Nymeria,” he breathes. “Nymeria Baratheon.”

Before Arya can answer, her daughter opens her impossibly small mouth to cry out. She shivers in the way that babes who are born too early shiver, but she is loud, crying forcefully, and neither of her parents can bring themselves to silence her, for her sound is proof beyond all doubt that she is alive and well.

— —

She startles awake more often than not, sometimes just opening her eyes, sometimes gasping, but never moving. She was afraid at first that she might lash out in her blindness and hit Nym, but never once has she flailed, as if her body knows she cannot afford to. Gendry’s arm always comes around Nym anyways, just to be sure that she sleeps as soundly as a babe can in between them. Her cradle rests empty in the corner, too far for her parents to bear.

When Arya has nightmares, she sometimes wishes Nym wasn’t there. She’s far too young to comprehend her surroundings, to truly see what’s going on, but all the same, Arya feels like her child can _see_ her and see the terrible things she sees when she closes her eyes and she wants such a better life for her than that. Better than kill or be killed or locked in a cell or beaten or stripped of identity or blinded. Better than anything she ever had, everything she sees (or doesn’t see at all) when she sleeps.

He can definitely see it, though. He waits for her to settle a moment, gives her fair warning that he is approaching. He touches her. Grounds her. Pulls her towards the slumbering babe in between them, reminds her that she has a purpose beyond suffering or emptiness. She’s suddenly so overwhelmed at the thought of him and the thought of not having him and having to do everything alone and of all the times she’s turned him away and broken his heart because she thought it would be better for him and -

She grabs his hand where it rests on her arm desperately, more widely awake than the creatures that mean to live at night. He looks startled and glances down at Nym, but she doesn’t stir. Arya stares at him, _really_ looks, trying to get him to see. “I love you,” she whispers, brow furrowed, jaw clenched, like she’s ready for a fight. “I love you.”

He’s confused. “I know.”

She shakes her head, frown deepening. “No, I _love_ you, Gendry. I _love_ you.” His hand moves up and down her arm in patterns, causing her to shiver. He tries not to look sad, Arya can tell, but it doesn’t work so well. It makes her sad that love declarations from her are something that would make him sad.

He shifts to move Nym apart from them for a moment and Arya sits up, chasing his heat and him and his body. She leans her back against his chest where it’s propped up and he drops a heavy arm around her front, holds her close. She’s glad he’s behind her. Glad he can’t see her cry. She doesn’t want to make him sad, but she does. 

She resolves to change that.

— —

“I do have some news to share with you regarding the Lady Stark’s recovery, my Lord,” says Maester Perbrook, voice grating a bit on his nerves, but he is called to attention by the meaning of his words.

“And?”

The maester sighs a heavy sigh and stops placing vials on his shelf to turn and look at him. “You are very lucky both she and the child survived.”

“Nymeria,” Gendry says absently, thinking rather more about the reports he was meant to attend to after fetching Nym a tonic. “And I know.”

“ _Very_ lucky, my Lord,” emphasizes the maester, and Gendry’s starting to get annoyed. “It’s unprecedented. The child is too small, born too soon, and should not have made it through the first night. Lady Stark lost more blood than most men loose on a battlefield, and yet she still stands.”

“We’re actually still having some difficulty with standing, as you know,” Gendry bites out, reminding himself not to grind his teeth too loudly or people might actually hear.

“Well yes, of course, I meant metaphorically.” The maester turns deliberately back to his shelf and then pauses to look back at Gendry over his shoulder. “Her child is a gift from the gods, no doubt. Baratheon and Stark bloods are strong. But what I am trying to tell you, my Lord, is that she will not survive another.” He moves a few bottles. Gendry can’t tell if there’s actually any fucking rhyme or reason to it or if he just wants to move his hands.

“She shouldn’t have more children, you mean?”

“She can’t.” Perbrook turns to face him once again, a sad look in his eyes. “Because of the damages she sustained, she will not ever be with child again.”

Gendry looks down, nodding, trying to process. He hadn’t even had time to think more than a few days in advance recently, let alone to consider another child or what Arya’s injuries would mean in the long term. He can’t really bring himself to feel sorry. Of course, he is regretful that Arya should have suffered any lasting damage, and he would have liked more children in some other life. A life where his wife hadn’t nearly bled to death for the last child, or been beaten within an inch of her life while carrying it. No, Gendry could do without seeing Arya pregnant again for some time.

“I’m sure you already know what this means,” says the maester, and a stone drops in Gendry’s stomach, something about propriety and Lord’s rules flitting through his brain. 

“Why don’t you tell me,” he says slowly, “Just to be certain we understand each other.”

Maester Perbrook puts down his vials solely to wring his hands together. “My Lord, as the Lord of Storm’s End your people must come first in your plans for the future. And as of the current present, Storm’s End has no heir, no one to inherit its properties after you are gone. As dear as the Lady Stark is and, I’m sure, will always be to us, she can no longer give you a son.” The man licks his lips. “You must remarry, my Lord. To someone who will give you an heir.”

Instead of seeing red, he sees white. His rage doesn’t sit hot and high in his chest, like it always has. It’s new to him, this sensation of cold fury resting in the pit of his stomach. He imagines his face is a similar vision of ice, one so cold that it would burn anyone who tried to touch. His hair stands on end, his heartbeat is slow and calm. He doesn’t feel he is fighting a battle; someone just doesn’t know he’s already won. He is certain he has become his wife in this moment.

“I have an heir, Maester Perbrook.”

“My Lord, I do not think-”

“Nymeria,” he says, more calm than he ever would have expected of himself, even though that’s not how he feels, not _really,_ “is my heir. She will rule Storm’s End. And though she is a child now, she will grow fast. It’s in our Baratheon genes. I’m not sure how kindly she would take to a maester who thought her mother to be inept at anything, let alone producing an heir.”

The maester pales, and reaches his hand out. “I did not mean to offend, my Lord, I only speak of the practical matter of things -”

“And I only speak to you as the Lord of this castle. Nymeria is my heir. Arya Stark is the only wife I will ever have. And if you see fit for either of those things to change, you will leave my service and the Stormlands and never return. Do you understand?”

The maester’s jaw snaps shut, and he nods, gulping. Gendry turns heel and exits the room, feeling more Stark than ever before.

— —

He storms into their chambers still seething from his conversation with the maester and hasn’t even given a second’s thought to whether or not Arya herself had been informed of this development in the status of her own health. She’s sitting in a chair by the fire when he enters, wrapped in furs to ward off the stormy chill that hangs in the air. He draws nearer and sees Nymeria resting against her chest, a slight rocking motion having lulled her to sleep.

At the sight of her tiny eyelids and fingers curled into little fists, Gendry finds it difficult to keep any rage in his heart. He approaches them and kneels quietly next to his girls to press his lips to Nym’s forehead, keeping his touch feather light so as not to wake her. No anger is left in him as he pulls away, only exhaustion. He’s so tired, tired from working, tired from defending his family, tired from worrying.

“I’ve always thought everyone wanted something,” Arya says unprompted, staring down at Nym with something like amazement. He is startled, but he listens. “That everyone had some other motive to get what they want. But she doesn’t want anything.” Her voice turns to a whisper, like she doesn’t know how these words can exist, like she’s never considered a world where they do. She pulls the baby closer. “She just wants me. Just me.”

Gendry’s heart shatters. A new one, twice as big, appears immediately in its place.

— —

“I don’t know how to tell if she’s growing alright,” Arya huffs quietly, frustrated. “She’s always been so small. Less tiny is still tiny and I don’t know if it’s the right amount of tiny.”

“Like you,” calls Gendry’s voice from his desk. She glares in his general direction from where she sits on an intricate carpet on the floor in front of the fire, watching as Nymeria’s legs kick into the air and she gurgles brightly. She lies on her back, watching the flames dance. Arya can see the reflection in her eyes. 

The nursemaid has been having some difficulty with her for a few nights, but they don’t mind keeping watch over her. If Arya had her own way, she’d never be apart from the girl again. She doesn’t want to miss a single second of her life, a single scrunch of her freckle-sized nose, a little wail of her larger than life voice.

Her eyes are open, so starkly ( _Baratheon-ly_ ) blue against the dark carpet. She gazes at Arya, makes motions as if to grab with her hands. Arya spots the shiny thing she’s after - a dagger stuffed where it belongs at her side. She stifles a laugh, and reaches to pluck the dagger and move it to safety. “Not yet, lamb.”

As she moves the dagger, it catches the light of the fire and reflects a spot of light onto the ceiling. Nymeria freezes, her entranced stare following the spot’s every flicker. Arya flicks her wrist so that the spot jumps back and forth, zigzagging at random across the ceiling of their chambers. 

A delighted giggle peels from Nymeria’s throat, and it seems Arya’s whole entire life has led to the moment when she would hear a child’s first laugh. 

— — 

“A miracle,” he murmurs moving quietly away from where Nymeria sleeps fitfully in her crib. “It’s a bloody miracle what that nursemaid can do. How can she get her to sleep like this?”

Arya can’t help but smirk a little at his words, though exhaustion weighs as heavily on her eyelids as she’s sure it does on his. “Been a while since we haven’t been joined by a third party.”

Gendry lifts an eyebrow and approaches her where she leans back against his desk. “A while,” he agrees, eyeing her.

“Anything you’ve been missing?” She whispers when he’s close enough. Shadows dance across his face.

“Maybe,” he breathes heavily. She doesn’t know who moves first, but in the next moment her backside is pressed into the desk and his lips are pressed to hers, and they are as fierce and fluent in each other as they’ve always been. He kisses her like he is a fever and she is a flame. She knows his ticks, he knows her scars. His tongue flicks over the roof of her mouth and she falls apart, forgets how to stand. His hands trace light patterns into her arms but do not stray. She takes the initiative herself and hoists herself to sit on the desk. He moves forward instinctually to stand between her legs, following her lips wherever she’ll take him. 

He grows more bold with time, daring to press his fingertips into her, daring to bear down on her like he usually does. She stifles a loud intake of breath when he bites at her lip, a little painfully cognizant of the sleeping child around the corner. Another sound escapes her when he presses further against her, more strangled, more stilted. He freezes, then pulls back.

“What is it?” He asks.

She shakes her head, reaches out to grab his head and drag it back to her mouth but he stops her. “Arya,” he says sharply, stepping back. She is so cold from the loss of him. He reaches to lift her back down to the ground and she winces, the spot where he’d pressed too hard against her center throbbing lightly.

His brow is furrowed in his telltale worrisome way. She could scream for want and lack of him, just like those months ( _months_ ) away, but it’s even worse now that he’s right next to her and unwilling. “Don’t be stupid,” she snaps at him, knowing he has nothing but love in his heart but hating the way he wears it. “I’m just a little sore. It’s nothing.”

She grabs his shirt and lifts on her toes to kiss him again, but he breaks it, looks at her like she’s lost her mind. “ _Nothing?”_ He says, disbelief permeating every syllable. His eyes move quickly between hers. “I watched you bleed to death in my arms. I watched you die.”

“I’m not dead, Gendry.”

“But what if you were?” He says quietly. “What would I do?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, frustrated, growing increasingly loud for all he becomes quiet. “Because I’m _not_.”

She tries to kiss him one more time. He doesn’t even let her get close. 

“For fuck’s sake, Gendry, I’m not going to _break_. I’m not _broken.”_ She doesn’t realize there are furious tears in her eyes until Nymeria lets loose a low cry, sounding like she might build to a full wail. 

Gendry looks at a loss, like he wishes he could be water to put out the fire but instead he is brush to keep it aflame. He shakes his head and turns away from her to attend to their daughter.

**— —**

“Sansa wants to meet her,” Arya says absently, working on her strength-building exercises in some corner or other of the chamber that he can’t see. Three moons since Nymeria was born and she’s almost back to her old self, lithe and nimble as ever as she dances through the castle shadows. She still falters, though, and he knows there are pains dwelling in her that will never fade. He wills himself to turn into medicine, fails. People aren’t medicine.

“ ’s a shame she can’t come here to visit,” he replies, pretending to be more preoccupied with his ledger than this conversation. “With a kingdom to look after, and all.”

He hears Arya breathe heavily, still going through her motions. “We need to go to her.” As always, dancing around opponents but not her point.

“We need to wait,” he counters, still doing his best not to try and look for her.

She stops her motions and rounds the corner so he can see her, sweaty in just a tunic and tight breeches, hair pulled back to the top of her head and let down in two braids. She throws the bowstaff she was working with against the wall and pushes her hands down on the desk to obscure his ledger, as if he could ever look at anything but her.

“Why would that be?” She demands in her quiet way, nothing too forward, but he knows exactly what she’s pushing for him to say. That she’s not strong enough yet, that she needs more time to heal, that _gods forbid_ she doesn’t have complete and utter control over the situation. He can’t say it, because then she’s won, but he can’t _not_ say it, because then she’s won, too. That tricky upper hand, always somehow playing to her advantage.

He swallows. “I haven’t gotten everything back in order here yet. We were gone for a bit, and the townspeople need some reorganizing and there’s a lot to be done -”

“Then I’ll go alone.”

He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to keep his frustration from leaking out. “We need to stay together. That’s what families do.”

“It’ll be a short trip to see more family.”

“Then wait for me to come too,” he snaps.

Arya’s silent for a minute, longer than he expected. He opens his eyes to find she’s sunk into a chair, her expression inscrutable beyond the tightness around her jaw. “Why did you want to marry me?”

He gapes at her. “This isn’t something you thought to ask before you agreed?”

She scowls and slouches a bit. She doesn’t answer, though, so he stands. 

“You know why,” he argues, moving towards her. “You’re my best friend. I love you, and-”

She cuts him off with a head shake. “I don’t want to make you sad.”

He kneels down to be even with her. She didn’t blurt it, she doesn’t _blurt_ things, but this might be the closest she’s ever come. She meets his gaze, but her eyes are wide. “You love me, but all I’ve ever done is break your heart.”

“Not true,” he says, except it comes out more like a whisper. 

“I break things,” she presses, not exactly looking sorry, but not exactly looking not. “That’s what I do. People. Hearts. Why would you marry someone like that?”

He thinks of all the times he’s lost her and somehow knows that’s what she means. When he was dragged away, when she left, when she was dragged away. He can’t find the air he needs to draw into his lungs. His hands reach out to touch her face. “I wouldn’t - wouldn’t even _have_ a heart worth breaking if it weren’t for you. You know that. Arya, you _know_ that.”

Except she doesn’t. He can see it on her face, she doesn’t know, or maybe she’s forgotten somewhere along the way, that without her he is nothing.

“Show me that,” she whispers. “Kiss me,” she begs. _Begs_.

He moves forward slowly, stilted, not too fast. Gently presses soft, soft lips to hers, does nothing more. Tries to let her be in control, tries so desperately to give back what she had lost.

It’s a mistake.

She pushes away from him and climbs off the chair, hiding her face, whisping herself into thin air faster than he can tear her pain from his chest.

— —

She finds him on the beaches, his boots and stockings laid out by a rock somewhere and his toes in the water. 

She takes off her own shoes to join him, the sharp sting of the cold water contrasting to the warm, wet air. “Going to storm soon,” she points out to him. “Probably don’t want to be here when it does.”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks out at whatever hazy horizon line he can make out through all this mist. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, kicking at the shallow waves with her feet. “I’m sorry I keep making things difficult for you.”

He shakes his head, looking down at the water.

“I know that I still need to rest,” she offers. “I do. I know myself. I know what I need.”

He turns to look at her at that, expression skeptical. “I seem to recall you trying to stand out of bed when you were barely conscious,” he grumbles.

She reaches down to let the water sting over her hands, brings it up to her cheeks. Wonders if they’re red. “True,” she allows. “I misjudge sometimes.” She moves closer to him, brings her cold, wet hands up to his cheeks. He looks resigned to her touch. “And I know you’ll stand with me through misjudgment.”

He nods, of course he will, he’s so wholly hers it hurts.

“But I need you to trust that I’m not making one now. I need you to trust me.”

“I do,” his voice comes gruffly. “More than anyone. But hurting you -”

“Is not something you’ve ever done,” she assures softly, and he snorts.

“Besides putting the baby in your belly that nearly ripped you in half -”

“So we’ve both misjudged,” she stops him. “But more than that, I don’t - I don’t feel -” She grapples for words, tries to find them in his eyes, bluer than the sea at their feet. “Real. I don’t feel real. And I need to _feel_ it.”

“I don’t understand,” he says desperately, clutching at her waist. “I don’t understand what you need.”

She feels a raindrop on her ear and somehow knows what he needs to hear. However strange the words feel on her tongue, she’ll say it for him. “There’s so much hate on my skin. All over me. I need you to replace it. Or wash it away. I need that.”

His grip tightens, his eyes darken. He is beginning to understand and the mist rolls in.

She leans closer and closer to him, mouth just inches from his. “Show me that skin is meant to do more than bleed. _Show_ me, Gendry.” 

He kisses her fast and hard and furiously. He kisses her with everything. His breath, his tongue, his teeth, his hands. Every rope he’d used to hold himself back before has snapped and she can feel heat boiling in her belly. Her arms wind around his neck, clutching desperately at him. She matches him with everything she has, wet and ferocious and so, so full of love. She has an opponent now that is her equal, that meets her on her own battlefield and gives her something to fight for. She can’t help but grin into his mouth because he sees it now, he sees the truth of things. She never needed him to give back what she had lost. She needed to take it back for herself, and take it back she does, standing on the edge of an ocean that led her to a home she never thought she’d have.

The rain beings to pour down. 

— —

“I don’t _want_ sleep -”

“Doesn’t matter what you _want_ ,” snips Arya back, crossing her arms over her chest and beaming her glare down to where an impudent Nymeria stands with echoed stubborn posture. “You _need_ to go with Garyll and go to bed. You know the rules.”

They’re a formidable pair, the two of them, but more scary is when they’re up against each other. Arya knows discipline like no other but Nym knows no fear. For all her mother is a warrior, Nymeria is a beast. Gendry usually has to gauge when an appropriate time to step in is. They are far too alike for this to end well. 

He stoops down to scoop Nym into his arms and she protests, arms still crossed, but doesn’t struggle against him. “Little girls need sleep to become big, strong girls, Nym.”

Her eyes brighten at that. “Strong like you?”

His eyes crinkle with his grin. “Aye. And like her,” he says, cocking his head towards Arya.

Nym pouts again. “She’s not _strong_. She’s fast.”

“And strong,” he counters, starting to trudge up the stone stairs that lead to where her nurse is waiting to put her to bed. It’s no effort at all, really. Even at four years old, she is the smallest thing he’s ever seen, all twig-like legs and gangly elbows. “She just wouldn’t want you to think so. She’s good at keeping her strength hidden.”

“Why?” mumbles Nym, though her eyelids are beginning to droop shut.

“So she can use it when she needs it most,” he says, pushing open the door to the nursery and bringing her over to the bed where Garyll stands waiting, hands twisted together in frustration.

“I’m sorry, my Lord,” she says anxiously. “I thought she was right behind me, but when I turned around-”

He raises a hand, shakes his head. He will never begrudge anyone for more time spent with his daughter. He lays her down on the bed, smooths his hand over her dark hair as Garyll curtsies and exits.

“Your mother loves you,” he promises. “And so do I.”

Her nose scrunches. She is half asleep already. “If you say so.”

“I do.” He presses a kiss to her forehead and she is already gone. He pulls the blankets up to cover her small form, a tug in his chest at the thought of leaving her side. Someone clears their throat in the doorway, and he looks to see Arya leaning against the wall, arms still crossed and a small smile gracing her features.

She tilts her head towards the door. “Fancy a walk?” She walks out, doesn’t wait for him.

She knows he’ll follow.

— —

The grassy cliff edge they find themselves at in the fading light looks much the same as he remembers it. Waves crash on the rocks below, and he doesn’t feel as foreign to their rhythm. He thinks she might feel the same way, closing her eyes and lifting her face to revel in the breeze. It lifts her hair off of her shoulders. The sunset dances off her skin in brilliant orange and pink light.

She opens one eye to find him gaping at her like he always seems to, caught in her beauty. She scoffs, but it is not without affection. She keeps walking. He matches stride with her.

“I visited the new maester today.”

Gendry nods. “What did you think of him? He’s young, but certainly not as much of a prat as Perbrook, may the bastard rest in peace.”

She smiles and shakes her head, but her smile dies looking out over the sea. “He told me something.”

His heartbeat quickens when he realizes this isn’t a conversation about their new staff, though he isn’t sure why. “Oh?”

“I’m with child. Again.”

She looks at him. She’s calm, calmer than the sea that’s far away, and he doesn’t understand how. He feels a panic begin to bubble in his chest, feels his breath grow short.

“Perbrook said that wasn’t possible.”

She shrugs. “He was wrong. Like you said, a prat.”

He shakes his head. “No. No, you can’t be with child.”

She huffs. “Well, it’s a little bit late on that front -

“You _can’t_ ,” he insists, hands shaking. “Do you _remember_ the last time? Do you - he said you wouldn’t _survive_ another - _Arya_ -”

Her hands reach out to still his fickle heart, resting on his shoulders. She doesn’t seem scared at all. He looks for a break in the mask, looks for a sign, but he finds none, so it must be how she really feels. “I don’t think,” she says quietly. “I would have conceived at all if it wasn’t okay for me to have it.”

“That’s not how it works,” he grates harshly, hopes she knows he’s not upset with her, just the universe for putting her on this path again, for threatening to take her away again.

She surprises him, wraps her arms tightly around him, holds him. He clutches at her back, trying to envelop her completely, trying to hide her from the world that would hurt her. He squeezes his eyes shut and drops his cheek to her head.

“I’m not afraid,” she says, still so calm. 

“I am,” he whispers. “I’m so afraid.”

She pulls back, smiles at him, radiant. “Nym was worth it. Yeah?”

He nods slowly, the lump in his throat making it entirely difficult to speak. 

“This will be worth it, and any pain that comes with it.” She faces him straight on, always so brave, always so sure. Her voice is his conviction. “Anything that’s ours is worth it.”

He presses a kiss to her forehead, pulls her close again and they look out over the water. 

They watch the light die. There is not a cloud in the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Sooo this has taken me like a whole entire month to write haha but i'm lowkey so proud of it it's my baby. I'm dealing with a lot of stuff rn so it's been good to have this Bebe to work on sometimes. I hope you enjoy! <3


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